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By using FEA and a FaroArm, AMS makes a claimed 1,500 hp without blowing to smithereens. Photo by Mark Vaughn

Rain. And mudslides. And hail, briefly. All on a mountain road. Not the best conditions to drive a 1,200-plus-hp Nissan GT-R.

But the GT-R has all-wheel drive, right? So what the heck?

We originally had a whole day planned with the AMS Alpha 12 GT-R, a monster tuner version of Nissan's potent supercar. We were going to go to the drag strip, the skidpad, the slalom, maybe take it to dinner and a movie if it felt in the mood.

The horsepower figure can be even higher than that. With 116-octane racing gasoline, the Alpha 12 hits a claimed peak of 1,500 hp, all without blowing to smithereens.

Normally, some tuner shops get to those claimed power peaks by blowing up customer cars and then suing either the customers or the hapless magazine slappies who happened to be behind the wheel when their creations detonated. The guys at AMS approached power building another way. They loaded everything from the stock GT-R onto a computer and started from there.

“We had to literally drop the engine out of the car and measure everything with a FaroArm, which can take real-life objects and transfer them to a 3-D CAD [computer-aided design] software,” said Musial, who is not related to Stan the Man. “We measured the full engine bay without the engine in it, then we measured the engine, all the parts on the engine and everything and then, in a 3-D environment on a computer, we actually modeled a turbo kit.”

This method had several advantages.

“It wasn't trial and error. . . . We found (on the computer) that at about 1,000 lb-ft of torque, we literally started ripping the block in half. The block would split in two and rip the top half of the block off. It took a lot of time and effort to figure out how to prevent that from happening.”

It took iron sleeves, a little bit bigger than the stock 3.8 bores, which meant the displacement was bumped to 4.0 liters.

“That again took modeling and FEA [finite element analysis] on the computer, putting stresses and modifying the block, seeing what we could do to make it stronger so it wouldn't do that [blow up]. But now we have a product that will take 13, 14, 1,500 hp and 1,000 ft-lb of torque reliably without exploding.”

Nice, eh? They did the same with the transmission, which, you may recall, used to disintegrate in stock form on the earlier GT-Rs.

“It's a driveline that we engineered from the beginning,” Musial said.

And how did it work on our day? First, Musial drove. He found a clear patch of freeway that was relatively dry, or at least less wet, and punched it.

“See?”

We saw. And felt. Quite a kick in the pants. Musial had been warning us that the shifts might come with a bit of a shock, something, like all tuning houses, they were “working on.” But the shift shock was less shocking than the thrust. This thing really moves. AMS claims it goes from 60 mph to 130 mph in 3.3 seconds. Zero to 60 mph comes up in 2.4 seconds in 1,500-hp trim. The quarter-mile takes less than nine seconds at almost 170 mph. AMS claims no other supercar in the world will do that, and its will do that while remaining highly streetable.

When we drove, though, we didn't get a chance to verify any of those numbers, but with some seat-of-the-pantalones feel it sure felt as if it would do something great.

So, yes, it felt impressive. But this was an incomplete test, the mechanical equivalent of a hello. Consider this a first glimpse of this very promising tuner car. AMS has done about 50 complete cars and sold parts for many others.

Visit www.amsperformance.com for more info.

Mark Vaughn
- After working in Europe five years covering F1, Group C and DTM, Vaughn interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since.
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